I could see the cogs turning in Brooke’s head when I asked her about the argument that two female coworkers had at her job; if it would have been perceived differently had it been two men or a woman and man. Her house smelled wonderfully from a pumpkin candle burning on top of a cabinet in her chic, modern dining room, the light of the day slowly fading from outside and the flame glowing a circle onto her ceiling. After a long pause, she quietly answered, “Yeah, I think it probably would have been different.”
This is the case with all of the women I interviewed for this piece. All of them described incidents to me in which they were treated differently simply because of the fact that they were women. Like Brooke, most were hesitant to acknowledge it, as if it might change the way they viewed the men around them. For Eileen, a 23-year-old with silver hair and a piercing sticking out from the top of her gums whenever she smiled, she currently works at a Sally Beauty in Syracuse but seemed particularly conflicted with a man who she had worked with at her previous position at a daycare. Talking over Facetime, her eyes shifted around her room, tripping over her words for a moment after I asked her if men ever treated the job differently depending on who was present. She prefaced her answer by defending one man she worked with, saying he was “definitely an outlier”, then stating he “liked to pretend to hit on all the women that worked there.” This is the same sort of story that Sara (talking to me under a pseudonym), 49, who previously worked for 20+ years as a nurse in a hospital in Oswego County, tells me about another coworker who made sexual comments to his female co-workers to “be funny”, although goes further than Eileen and speculates that he eventually wanted his comments to be reciprocated. Like Eileen, Sara never reported this to anyone, emphasizing more than once that she never thought of herself as a victim and found him to be “harmless.” He was eventually forced to resign due to multiple allegations by female patients. In Eileen’s case, she was the one to quit, attributing it to the stress of the expectations put on the women working at the daycare, her coworkers, and the children she was looking after.
Although Miranda, 21, did not experience sexual harassment, she confidently confirmed that her workplace was biased against women: “It’s just a male-dominated career. It can be a struggle sometimes.” Working as an EMT Basic in Lewis County, she admitted that the type of behavior that goes on between men and women is directly against the sexual harassment training she received. This response was echoed by Sara, who felt that her co-workers at the hospital did not understand harassment either, despite the training.
Medical fields have long been harbors of patriarchal structures, only within the past 50 years opening up to women after the passage of Title VII in 1964 which barred gender discrimination in employment decisions, and a question that the Supreme Court is set to once again interpret this year for transgender workers in the case of R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Only this year did New York ban non-consensual pelvic exams by medical residents on sedated women before surgery. Like Miranda, most of the women I talked to when I asked about feminism and the movements that started to make sure women could work outside the home, seemed to go back and forth between supporting it and feeling as though modern-day feminists often were “too much” or went too far. When I asked if Miranda believed feminism had directly contributed to her ability to be in the medical field at all, though, she agreed. Eileen was the only one who considered herself a true feminist without caveats.
When the boom of working women started in the 80’s, women faced a workplace that was vastly different from the one today. “SJWs” were called “Women’s Libbers,” and what would come to be known as the “boy’s club” pervaded most professions, hoping women would simply quit out of frustration from exclusion. In the 1980 film 9 to 5, directed by Colin Higgins and starring legends such as Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin, this is best exemplified by a pivotal scene in which Tomlin’s character, Violet, is passed over for another promotion to a man she herself trained. Violet’s boss eventually admits that a man needs to be in the position simply because their clients don’t want women. In the song written for the movie by Parton, she sings, “Want to move ahead, but the boss won’t let me— I swear that man is out to get me!” It is as sickening — and illegal — today as it was back then.
And yet, it seems the boy’s club never went away, simply became more hidden. Sara was the oldest woman I spoke to and someone who entered the workforce after high school during this boom. Even she says that at her current job as an RN Supervisor in Onondaga County, she finds that men allow the boys club to continue when the women aren’t around and notices how they watch their words when women are. However, Sara’s company is fairly integrated: she estimates management is 50/50 men and women, while lower-level positions have more women. This cannot be said for Brooke, who is 20 and travels to work at a well-known banking chain as a teller around Oswego and Onondaga County, and was quick to notice just how often it seemed women were passed over for upper-level positions within the company. Almost all of the women I talked to, minus one, were perceptive of how many men and women worked with them in each of their jobs, and this extended to management. While Brooke’s direct supervisor was a woman, so were most of Brooke’s coworkers, leading to an even more obvious discrepancy between the genders of low-level workers and upper-level management. “I think men don’t want to be a bank teller,” she said while she explained to me how underappreciated she and her female coworkers often felt by management, even as they took on more responsibilities with fewer benefits. This statement was echoed by Mira, who is 21 and studying to be a NICU nurse at Cayuga Community College, saying, “Guys are almost scared to be nurses, like it’s going to take away their masculinity or something,”.
One of the biggest issues I encountered was on the subject of benefits. Historically in America, health insurance is provided through work, and usually, only at the behest of union bargaining. It’s why fast food and retail jobs typically don’t offer health insurance, though current trends suggest this might soon change. Union support in America is at a historic five year high at 64%, and yet, none of the women I talked to seemed to fully understand what a union was or even the benefits they might offer, and only Miranda’s work had one. When I pressed for details on the benefits she might receive, she was unclear on them, though mentioned her union representative and she had been in contact frequently. Miranda, who had suffered a miscarriage last year, stated that her biggest priority with union benefits was on the subject of things like paid time off for things such as medical and family leave, as she was planning in the future to start a family. Miranda’s current boyfriend already had two children, one two years old and another six months old, and emphasized she was a big believer in family, something that directly contributed to her love for EMS work.
Eileen, on the other hand, laughed, slightly embarrassed and jokingly putting her hand over her face when I asked her if she was in a relationship, “No — why you gotta bring it up!” Though she could relate to the want for things like paid time off and better healthcare benefits. Her current position at Sally Beauty as a Beauty Consultant is flexible with her schedule, letting her take care of things such as doctors’ appointments and go to social & family events, and states not being able to do this at her daycare position directly led to her quitting due to the stress.
It’s a concern that directly affects Mira, who works as a consultant for Pampered Chef. Pampered Chef sells kitchen and bakeware and is a multi-level marketing company (referred to as “MLMs”). MLMs work differently than traditional retail jobs, in which consultants buy products from the company at a discount and are then fully in charge of marketing & selling the product. After selling a product, part of the sale goes to the company and another part to the consultant to (hopefully) recoup the loss & make a profit. Many of these companies rely on their consultants recruiting more consultants, who then recruit more consultants under them, and so on and so forth. The main sell of recruiting is the financial rewards to be gained from a downline in the form of their sales, and bonuses from the company. Many of these companies also open up opportunities for women to gain money when they otherwise couldn’t, and as Mira tells me is in fact the only reason she decided to do it. As a woman with two young children and a house to manage along with going to school, having the flexibility of a small “side-hustle” to bring in money keeps things from getting too tight. MLMs have a history of being deceptive with the promises they make to consultants and about their products, and recently have been the subject of a number of documentaries, lawsuits, and federal investigations into their practices. Pampered Chef, thankfully, is not one of these MLMs, and the promise of being able to make the money back on the consultant starting kit Mira bought was fulfilled.
Mira was also unaware that unions offered things like paid maternity leave, of which America is one of only four other countries left in the world to not guarantee it alongside Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland (not to be confused with Switzerland, which does guarantee it). The only thing Mira had ever heard in regard to unions from her co-workers was complaining, mostly she said about meetings or union dues. She agreed, though, they seemed like a good thing, and something she wanted to know more about for the future.
However, Sara was more interested in the aspect of preventing wrongful termination, and said that at her hospital position, union pamphlets and petitions had been organized a few times, only for it to never materialize. In nearly all states in America, there is “at-will employment” laws, which dictate that without the sort of union contract that stipulates what workers can and cannot be fired for and the proper procedures for doing so, someone can be fired by their employer for any reason (notwithstanding class protections such as race, gender, national origin, etc., including union organizing), even ridiculous ones such as not liking the same sports team as your boss or wearing an orange shirt on a Tuesday. LegalAdvice, a forum on Reddit dedicated to giving free legal advice to those in need, is often inundated with questions from recently fired workers asking how they could be fired without cause. Often, without a union, the answer is simple: because you just can be.
Unions also often represent the sort of community within the workplace, one Mira was able to find within Pampered Chef consultant groups, a majority of which are also mothers. Without this support, Mira said she wouldn’t have been able to do it at all, being “so lost” without the emotional support and knowledge of the women around her. Mira, though, also detailed the worst experience of sexual harassment that I heard. Working at the FitzPatrick Nuclear Plant previously, on her first day Mira was warned by one of the only five other women working there to not “smile, make eye contact, laugh, or talk to” any of the male contract workers, lest they then believe she wanted to “get laid”. This behavior also extended into cat-calling and sexual advances, and if those were ignored, Mira said she was told to smile more and called “derogatory names” that she didn’t even want to repeat to me. While Mira could have gone to Human Resources about this behavior, she said it would only lead to more harassment, labeling, and ostracization by others. Even if all the women had come together as a community and rose up? Mira still genuinely believed it would have changed nothing — in her own words, it was “normal.”
Though what I saw in the women I interviewed was not their experiences of discrimination or harassment, but the resilience in which they dealt with this. Four out of the five women I interviewed owned their own home, two had children, and all of them had been through hardships outside of work yet refused to give up. Miranda found solace in her boyfriend, also an EMT, the two being able to connect and comfort each other through the stress of the job. While Miranda admits her pay is “not good”, the job is stressful, and most of the harassment she receives from her co-workers are from women seeing her as competition to their romantic prospects with the male EMTs, I can hear in her voice how much love and true passion she has for the job. The same can be said of Mira and Sara, both also healthcare workers with a family to manage who found solace in being able to help others and be with them at their most vulnerable. Brooke is considering going back to finish her degree to get a Bachelors in Business, even after she feels that SUNY Oswego “screwed [her] over” in regards to registering for the program. As she told me about the bank management, “Let’s get a woman in there, I want a woman to make that much money.” and plans on hopefully one day working as a Financial Advisor for a Nonprofit. Eileen, on the other hand, thrives in the creative, already having made several sculptures and other art pieces at her time in Oswego dedicated to exploring the human body and what it means to be human, and is coming back for Graduate school to continue to do so.
One question I asked all of the women I talked to was what they thought the American Dream was, and if they believed in it. While almost all of them defined it as having a house, family, and good job, they also told me that it was impossible or extremely difficult, but Sara said something interesting: “My version of the dream has changed over the years,” The definition of America, and what it means to be American, is an ever-shifting concept and something we all struggle with today. The women I talked to, though, all seemed to embody that shifting as they persevered no matter what they were thrown. There is a reason that the first thing many of our ancestors saw when they first came to America was Lady Liberty — a woman putting her fist up and continuing to light the way, despite whatever may come ashore. While defining the American Dream may be a difficult task in modern-day, I have no qualms whatsoever in saying that the American Dream is alive in the women who keep trying, and perhaps, America needs to start trying with them.